"Poems Sometimes Happen All at Once"

"Poems Sometimes Happen All at Once"

Michael Meyerhofer on poetry notebooks.

This week, we introduced our Poetry Folio '23, a series of new poems between seasons. We will continue posting the folio until March 15. To celebrate the tradition of poetry for all seasons, our poetry editor Michael Meyerhofer offers the following reflection on the blank notebooks he first began using as a writer. Don't lie; we've all used such notebooks, whether they're Moleskine planners, legal pads, or sketchbooks. In the meantime, please look out for new poems (almost) every day.

On Notebooks

In the tiny farm-town where I grew up – just three stoplights bordered by placid cornfields and a maze of highways bristling with delivery trucks – our bank used to give away these pocket-sized notebooks to anyone who wanted them. On the cover was the bank’s name, phone number, and modest business hours, followed by twenty or thirty blank pages about as long as your index finger. When I was little, my mom got me my first one, expecting me to fill it with pictures of winged knights and fire-breathing dinosaurs. Instead, I started writing stories. Over the years, those little notebooks continued to populate our town – I once heard someone joke that there were three of them for every resident – and I continued to carry them around in my pocket like a switchblade or a passport. I brought a stack of them to college, too, where stories morphed into poems, sometimes just single lines or images that didn’t seem to fit in anywhere else (a feeling I understood well). I remember jotting down my horror in response to the ghastly footage I saw in a Holocaust class, as well as my virginal and surely cringeworthy responses to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and D.H. Lawrence, followed by contemporaries like Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, and Billy Collins, all of whom helped open my mind to the full, dizzying range of style and substance that poetry can accommodate – not to mention its immediacy. I remember the angry nonsense I wrote after my mother died, after I got my first rejection letter, after I looked out the window of my dorm and saw a whole lake turn orange at sunset. Since then, those little notebooks have mostly been replaced by note-taking apps on my phone, though I still find myself using them at similar times: stuck in a waiting room, stalled in a traffic jam, lying sleepless in the dark. They remind me that while my poems sometimes happen all at once, hammered out in a single sitting after some stray idea takes over my brain like a child throwing a roundhouse, mostly they happen in stages – in fits – and that the point is just to start somewhere – anywhere – and fill these tiny little pages while we can.

Atticus in Seattle

We are still open for submissions for short essays from/within/about video games for our submission call WALKTHROUGH. Additionally, we are open for submissions for Issue Four (and beyond) until March 15.

Speaking of March, AWP is right around the corner, and we are pleased to announce our shared reading with Barzakh Lit Mag at The Grumpy Bean in downtown Seattle on March 10, 6:30-8:30 PM. Join us for some live readings! As an online literary journal not grounded in a specific location, events like this allow us the rare luxury of sharing our work in person. Plus there's coffee!

In the meantime, I hope you keep writing. The world needs it.Peace,Keene ShortEditor-in-Chief

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEW

When Poetry Isn’t Philosophy, and Vice Versa

PJ Krass reviews BEYOND BELIEF, by John Koethe.

"This is a plainspoken poet eager to explore where an abstract thought could take him in this all-too-material world."

NEW FROM THE ATTIC

Dispatches from Ukraine, Part 4: The Slowest Motion

by Olha Svyripa

 

"People took out their phones to take pictures, some started waving to greet them. And the soldiers waved back."

SPECIAL CALL FOR THE ATTIC During February, we will have a special call for short essays drawing from experiences with video games, to be published in summer, 2023.

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